YouTube

They may not have planned it this ways, but YouTube is the go-to channel for music and videos amongst the young audiences between 12 and 24. Taking into consideration its billion plus monthly users, that includes this segment, a paid on-demand music streaming service seemed the natural progression. Although Google had originally planned to launch the service late last year, the project is still a work-in-progress due to several reasons.

After Twitter and YouTube, it’s now time for Google to cry foul. Apparently Turkey is asking their ISPs to intercept Google's public DNS service - primary: 8.8.8.8, secondary 8.8.4.4 – and redirect to their own servers, in order to reinforce the ban on the microblogging site and the video-sharing site, amongst others.

Twitter was recently banned in Turkey over failure to remove certain content, something that resulted in a backlash and, as of yesterday, legal ruling that it must be reversed. It seems the battle hasn't been yet won, however, with YouTube now also being blocked in the region due to an allegedly leaked video revealing possible war plans.

Disney has been on a buying spree over the last year or so. The major purchase for Disney was buying George Lucas' Lucasfilm and announcing that new Star Wars films were coming to theaters. Disney has announced another purchase this week that nets it one of the largest production studios making video for YouTube.

The team at Valve responsible for releasing the gaming documentary "Free to Play" aren’t making any attempt to pretend it was done for profit in and of itself. Instead, released in its entirety entirely for free, Free to Play is a feature-length documentary aimed at changing the minds of those who view it, or for those that already consider gaming to be a "legitimate" occupation, sport, or activity, to strengthen their resolve.

YouTube is home to vast quantities of videos, many of which violate its terms of service and guidelines in some way or another. Anyone can flag a video they feel is in violation of the TOS, but some 200 individuals, organizations, and government agencies have so-called "super flaggers" status, giving their flags clout.

This morning YouTube went down at approximately 11AM CST, with reports coming in throughout the hour. At the moment it would not appear that collection pages are down, just pages with display information about the videos and the videos themselves. Users trying to access YouTube videos throughout the United States are seeing messages that include talk of "something went wrong" and the always classic "A team of highly trained monkeys has been dispatched to deal with this situation."

When attempting to view certain content on YouTube, German viewers are presented with one of the many content-blocked notifications the video streaming service offers up, this one in particular blaming German rights organization GEMA for the lack of availability. GEMA didn't take kindly to the notification's wording, and took the matter to court.

On the company's blogspot today, YouTube announced a couple of changes, most notable among them being a redesign that aims to accommodate screen sizes of all flavors. Users will also see changes to the playlists feature, which makes making and browsing the feature easier.

Google has made Susan Wojcicki its new head of YouTube, with the former chief of the streaming video division reportedly going on to set up an "early-stage project" in the same way that Andy Rubin set aside Android to work on robotics. Wojcicki, who most recently was Google's senior vice president of advertising and commerce, was also the one of the first people to join the company back in 1999.